Not the sort of safety issues I think you mean, but there have been some rather questionable behaviours from the current owners in the last year or so. A quick search for Audacity here or elsewhere will find the details.
So of course they freak, when it is suddenly creeping in, in something they trusted.
In the second case, intentions have been hidden or they have changed, which obviously erodes user trust.
It wasn’t clear it was opt-in (although maybe the code was clear?).
Either way, adding telemetry (especially to open source) is obviously going to cause a ruckus, so they obviously mishandled the situation.